Written by: Katharina Hellmann, Guest Writer
Research shows that the visible manifestations of climate change and our perception of it is affecting our mental health: Increasing numbers of people are suffering from climate anxiety, eco-grief, sadness, anger, guilt, despair and other similar emotional reactions to climate change, which can spiral into depression or even post-traumatic stress disorder.
For some people, experiencing these strong emotions can become the driver for action such as environmental activism or making changes towards a more sustainable lifestyle. However, without knowing how to manage our mind and emotions around climate change, this action cannot be sustained effectively in the long run, leading to burnout and exhaustion. For many other people, their climate change related emotions affect them to a point where they not only experience immense emotional suffering and subsequent loss of quality of life, but where they are effectively blocked from taking any sort of action that might bring about necessary change. As the planet warms, the question of how to best address these climate change emotions and how to turn them into effective action is becoming more important every day.
In the following, I will teach you 3 secrets about your emotions that will help you deal with overwhelming emotions in a healthy way, reclaim your quality of life and regain your power to take effective action.
How do you feel when you think about climate change?
As in introduction, think about your answers to the following questions ‒ ideally, write them down on a sheet of paper:
What is your predominant emotion when you are thinking about the climate crisis?
What are you typically doing when you are feeling this emotion?
What do you think is the reason you are feeling this emotion?
Have a look at what you have written. There is no right or wrong answer to these questions. The purpose is to become aware of what is going on inside of you.
Question No.1 What are emotions and why are the even important?
What is an emotion?
Emotions are vibrations of energy that originate in our brain and move from our brain into and through our body ‒ vibrations of energy, nothing else. Sometimes these vibrations cause uncomfortable or slightly painful physical sensations in our body such as heated cheeks, crying or headache. But they are unable to severely harm or kill us ‒ in fact they are completely harmless.
What has our brain to do with our emotions?
The fact that our emotions originate in our brains plays a crucial role. Our brain is divided into a primitive, „animal“ part and a more sophisticated, „human“ part, operating on an evolutionary programming from thousands of years ago. Our brain is designed to ensure our survival as a species by avoiding pain, seeking pleasure and doing both with as little energy expenditure as possible.
Avoiding pain means that our brain tries to keep us away from any actual or potential danger to our physical survival, permanently scanning our surroundings for anything that is wrong in the world and classifying anything unknown as a potential danger. There may be instances when our physical survival is under immediate threat due to climate change ‒ for example, when we are in the middle of a forest fire or flood. But there are other instances when we are not physically threatened, for example when we are sitting on our sofa at home and reading news articles about forest fires or floods happening in other parts of the world. Still, from reading alone we can have the emotional reaction of climate anxiety as if we were actually in danger, because our „animal“ brain is kicking into flight-flight-freeze mode instinctively without differentiating between a real, momentary and a potential future danger to our survival.
Seeking pleasure means that our brain tries to keep us safely ensconced in comfort, warmth and familiarity. Whenever we have the choice of doing something uncomfortable or difficult versus staying safe and warm within our comfort zone, our brain will by default choose the second option. And because avoiding pain and seeking pleasure is what our brain knows to do best, and because repeating established behavior patterns uses up the least amount of energy, it is impossible to change our life without changing our brain first.
Secret No.1 Our emotions determine our entire human behavior
Many people think that our emotions are “soft” and “insignificant”, something that you can worry about when you have nothing better to do.
However, what I want to tell you is that our emotions are amongst the most important things in our lives, because they determine our entire human behavior. As a consequence of the evolutionary programming of our brain, we naturally avoid negative emotion (pain) and move towards positive emotion (pleasure). Everything we do our don’t do in our lives is based on either how we currently feel or how we want to feel or fear to feel in the future. For example, we buy a status symbol not because we want the thing itself, but because we want the emotion that we believe having the thing will give us. And we are not doing anything to reduce our carbon footprint, because we fear a loss of comfort.
What does this mean for you if you are suffering from climate anxiety?
There is nothing wrong with you if you are feeling climate anxiety. On the contrary, climate anxiety is a completely normal and human reaction to the threat of climate change. You are also not alone in feeling climate anxiety ‒ all human brains are wired in the same way. Therefore, every single human on the planet will experience anxiety at some point in their life ‒ the focal point of the anxiety (e.g. climate change, losing a loved one) may be different, but the feeling of anxiety itself is universal to all of us.
You feeling climate anxiety is just your brain doing what is has been programmed to do best. However, this programming, if unchecked, will keep you stuck in fight/flight/freeze mode within your comfort zone. So, if you want to stop suffering from overwhelming climate change emotions and reclaim your quality of life and your power to take action, you must learn how to override your animal brain by consciously managing your human brain. This is what I am teaching my clients how to do.
Question No.2 What is actually causing your emotions?
The problem with our current emotional education
Our current emotional education leads us to believe that all our emotions are caused by external factors such as politics, things that happen to us in our everyday life or what other people do or say to us ‒ when we are told as children “you are making me angry with your misbehaviour” or “did that other kid hurt your feelings?”, we are effectively being taught that we are responsible for how other people feel and that everything happening to us in our life is responsible for how we feel. The result is that we are depending on these external factors to behave as we want them to so that we can feel better, and we are constantly trying to get these external factors to behave how we want them to. And when this does not work ‒ and it rarely does, because we can’t always change how the world or other people behave, we start to blame these external factors for how we feel as a consequence.
For example, if you are frustrated about someone who is not taking climate change as seriously as you would want them to, you will likely believe that this person and their lack of understanding or action about climate change are responsible for your frustration. And you will likely try to get this person to change their mind and behavior, because you believe that once they think and act like you want them to, you will not feel frustrated about them any more. And when that doesn’t work, you will likely blame them for your frustration. The result of this is not only conflict in our relationships, but a feeling of powerless and being at the effect of others.
Secret No.2 Your emotions are caused by your thoughts
Your emotions are not caused by anything outside of you. The way you feel with regards to anything in your life is determined by the way you think about it. Your thoughts and beliefs are the true cause of your emotions ‒ as well as the actions powered by these emotions. Negative thoughts create negative emotions, positive thoughts create positive emotions.
Here is the proof that your thinking is causing your emotions: How is it possible that two people experiencing the same external event have completely different emotions about it? How can one person reading a news article about people dying from an unusual heat wave not worry at all, while another person reading the identical article drowns in climate anxiety? It is not the news article or the heat wave that is causing their emotions, because otherwise these two people would feel exactly the same. The reason is that these two people have different thoughts about what they are reading. One of these two people may be thinking that heat waves have always happened naturally in the Earth’s history and therefore sees nothing to worry about. The other person may be thinking that this is a sign that humanity will be going extinct soon.
So it is never the external event that is the cause of how you feel, the cause is always how you think about this external event. The way you are thinking about what is happening in your life is responsible for how you feel and for how you show up in your life as a consequence.
And this is actually the best news I could ever give you: What you are thinking about whatever is happening in your life, what you are making it mean for you, is optional and your choice. You may currently be making this choice unconsciously as a result of neurological programming you were born with or acquired throughout your biography. However, it is a choice nonetheless. And it is possible to take conscious control of your thinking, to shift your perspective and to reprogram your brain to a new default way of thinking that is serving you better. And as a result, you will feel and act differently in your life. You have all the power here.
What does this mean for you if you are suffering from climate anxiety?
It is not climate change that is causing your climate anxiety. You are feeling climate anxiety because you are thinking thoughts about climate change that make you feel anxious, such as „humanity is going extinct, my kid is going to have a terrible life“. This is not to say that climate change exists only in your mind, that it is not a huge problem or that how you are thinking about it is wrong. All I want to say is that climate change in and of itself does not cause your emotions. Instead, way you are thinking about climate change is responsible for your climate change emotions.
Your thoughts are choices. You get to decide what you want to think about climate change, what you want to make it mean for you. You can choose to create climate anxiety for yourself by looking at everything that is wrong in the world and at all the reasons humanity is doomed, which will probably result in you giving up and staying in your comfort zone. Or you can choose to shift your perspective by looking at all the things that are being done to fight climate change and at the things that you could contribute to the fight, thus creating empowerment, determination or other emotions that will propel you forward into action
Question No.3 What is the best way to deal with overwhelming negative emotion?
The problem with our current emotional education
We are being taught from a young age that the goal in life is to be happy all of the time ‒ for example, social media shows us only the beautiful, joyous side of life ‒ and that negative emotions are bad and should be remedied as soon as possible. However, no one teaches us how to handle negative emotions in a healthy way or how to generate positive emotion from within ourselves. Instead, the advertising industry tells us that the only way to feel happy is by buying stuff.
The consequence is that our default way of dealing with negative emotion is to try to get rid of it as soon as possible by pushing it away, bottling it up or by distracting or numbing ourselves from it. This causes us to suffer, because the bottled-up emotion will get stronger over time until we inevitably run out of energy to keep it bottled up, and because the things we typically do to get rid of our emotions have bigger and more long term negative effects than feeling the emotion itself could ever have: For example, if you distract yourself from feeling climate anxiety with too much alcohol, food or TV, the result can be addiction, weight gain and time spent on something that does not help the fight against climate change ‒ which can then lead you to beat yourself up over it, feeling worse as a result and then having to compensate even more for feeling worse. The end result is a vicious cycle of negative emotion that we feel unable to get out of by ourselves.
Secret No.3 There is no healthy way around negative emotion, the only way is through
If you want to stop suffering from overwhelming emotions, regain your quality of life and reclaim your power to act, the only way is to learn how to process your emotions. Processing your emotions means actually feeling your emotions all the way through, allowing them to flow freely through your body without obstruction, so that they can eventually dissipate naturally. Processing your emotion will not only preserve your emotional and mental health, but help you see that you are in control of your emotions and not the other way around. Here is how to do that:
Step 1: Awareness. As a first step, become aware of how you are feeling in any given moment. Take a conscious look at how you are feeling in this moment in time, identify the emotion and give it a name. If you cannot give an exact label to the emotion just yet, identifying it as either good or bad will be enough.
Step 2: Observation. Become the watcher of your own emotion and observe from a place of scientific curiosity what the energetic vibration of this particular emotion is causing in your body: Is there any coldness, warmth, tingling somewhere in your body? How would you describe this emotion to someone who has never felt it before? Examining your emotion like that will help you detach from it, calm down and realize that your emotion cannot harm you, that you can handle anything the emotion is doing to you.
Step 3: Allowing. Stay present with whatever is happening for you while you experience the emotion. Meet the emotion with compassion, move towards it, relax into it, don’t give in to distracting yourself from it. Let the energy of this emotion free-flow through your system without obstructing, changing or suppressing it.
Step 4: Acceptance. Every emotion, no matter how strong or difficult, is an integral part of the experience of being human. Negative emotions are not only normal, they are actually valuable and necessary, because without unhappiness we would not recognize happiness. The moment in which you stop fighting reality and fully accept that feeling negative emotion is a normal and healthy part of the human experience, you stop making the bad worse than it is and regain your freedom and power.
What does this mean for you if you are suffering from climate anxiety?
Processing climate change emotions and accepting them as part of life will not make us lose our energy for climate action or require us to accept that climate change is happening without being able to do anything about it. On the contrary, accepting all of your emotions as healthy and valuable will free up the mental and emotional energy that you are currently spending on wishing that you felt better than you are ‒ energy that you can then put towards a more constructive use, for example by actually effecting the change that you want to see in the world.
(Climate) anxiety is just a vibration of energy that we call „anxiety“. There is nothing to be afraid of. There is nothing negative or positive about it. The only reason we even perceive anxiety as negative is because it feels uncomfortable, so someone gave it a negative connotation. The truth is that it just is. Nothing is wrong.
Even if we process our anxiety, it will always come back again. However, we can decide whether we want it to take the driver seat or the passenger seat of our life. Do you want to let your life be be at the effect of your anxiety? Do you want to let yourself be held back by it? You don’t need to wait until the anxiety is gone, you can decide to take action regardless.
So, how do you want to deal with the challenges of our time? Who do you want to be in this crucial moment for humanity?
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Katharina Hellmann, Brainz Magazine Guest Writer
Katharina is a Certified Life Coach and Certified Climate Change Coach. She helps eco-conscious people overcome climate anxiety, regain their quality of life and take effective and empowered action, so that they can slash their carbon footprint and become part of the solution on fighting climate change without having to give up what they really love in their life. Doing what we have always done will only repeat our past. Lasting change in our lives and in the world starts with changing how we think, feel and behave. And we can only be of help to others and to the planet if we are at our full mental and emotional capacity. This is where coaching comes in. Learn more about Katharina and how to work with her at www.ecoanxietycoach.com / Instagram: @ecoanxietycoach
